Stories

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Recently (on March 32nd), the Rubygems team officially released the 1.7 branch (currently 1.7.1). This new release brings several enhancements, bug fixes, and deprecations. Coinciding with the release, Bundler 1.0.11 was released to support both Rubygems 1.6 and 1.7.

Ryan Wolcox dropped us a line this week to let us know about his mobile Rails development setup. He uses an Amazon EC2 instance for his primary development and just SSH's into it to start his work. He details how he uses port forwarding, GNU screen, Mutt, and more.

Jason Brownlee has been putting together a book called Clever Algorithms which focuses on "nature-inspired programming recipes." The algorithms included cover evolutionary, swarm, probabilistic algorithms, and more. The book is freely available online and contains Ruby code examples for all algorithms, and the book's source is available on GitHub. Also, if you like the content, you can purchase a physical copy to give Jason some love.

As a project grows and your business rules change, it is not uncommon to begin collecting invalid objects in your database. This is where active_sanity can, well, save your sanity. It will scan your database and report invalid instances and optionally move them into a separate table for later reference.

Xavier Shay wrote up a great article covering different types of asynchronous Ruby code. Specifically, he walks through Event Machine and compares it to the new Goliath web server's Fiber implementation.

With RailsConf 2011 coming up next month, it's time to start collecting nominations for this year's Ruby Hero Awards. If you know someone in the community who did something especially cool - wrote or managed a great library, an excellent blog post, useful screencast, or mailed you a large check - then this is your chance to give back. Head over to RubyHeroes.com and cast your ballot today.

MiniTest, Lunchy, Ruby Method Finder, and using Backup with Heroku's pgbackup, as well as HTML5 multi-file upload, Rack::PageSpeed, and a Rails Testing Workshop for charity are on this episode of Ruby5.